Taken at Birth by Jane Blasio

Author:Jane Blasio [Blasio, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

1997

DURING MY CHILDHOOD and into my early teens, I hung around the garage of my father’s long-haul trucking business. Mostly I would spend my time irritating the mechanics, but on some days, they’d let me drive one of the cars used to run parts all over the dirty parking lot and back around the concrete-block garage. My favorite car was an old beat-up 1960s blue-and-chalky-white Suburban that, on an exemplary day, would make it over forty mph and on other days was lucky if it started. It gave its passengers a bumpy, lurching ride with a good share of shaking and staggering. The blue was painted on by hand and was so bright that it glowed against the white. The tires were like big balloons, and it had a horn that stuck and sounded like a high-pitched auctioneer prattling on and on. I had to hit the dash over and over until the mechanism caught and brought back silence. I called her Big Blue, and she accompanied me on several high school evenings with friends as we bounced our way across Akron, making mischief now best forgotten.

Memories of the truck yard came up at a pivotal moment in my life, when the challenges were clear, and the memory cheered me on to keep going. I shook my head free of Big Blue and returned to the business at hand. Back in Georgia, I was standing at the bottom of the steps of the Fannin County Courthouse once again. I’d come to a point in my search where I felt just like that old Suburban, trying to get the show on the road but not sure if I was ever going anywhere. With my sights set on the probate office, I could hear that old Suburban rattling its metal and its engine humming as I walked across the threshold again with birth certificate in hand.

Two beautiful and smiling women greeted me, once again making the Fannin County Probate Court the friendliest government agency, state or federal, in which I’d pulled reports or certificates. And once again, I told my story and the basics of what I knew about the Hicks Clinic. I had the birth certificate I’d memorized since childhood in my bag but wanted to see what could be found, if there was more or even different info. I left that building grateful for the respect I received during my visit, and within a couple of days, I was back in Ohio planning my next steps. I communicated with the courthouse several times after that visit. Eventually I realized it was time to go public with the story in hopes of finding more people like me, to bring as many of us together as possible to find records or birth mothers.

I knew there were others. Michelle and my cousin Markie were proof. And faint whispers of a few other children our pediatrician took care of led me to believe they were also from the Hicks Clinic. But my heart all but stopped when I learned through my research that over two hundred babies were sold at the clinic.

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